COVID

Science as Scripture

Born into a fundamentalist religion, I was conditioned from my first breath (and even before that) to accept a reality that crowded everything else out. God and ITs Truths are everything. Conformity was life. Nonconformity was evil. We were right. Everyone else was… well, I’d show them the light.

But I’d never seen god, audited ITs books, or personally verified a miracle. No one I knew had either. Authority simply pointed up a chain of authority that disappeared into fog. Surely someone, somewhere, had checked the math.

It was inherited, not earned, certainty.

It’s easy to mock religious belief as naïve. But, the impulse to swallow conditioned truths whole is not a religious anomaly. It’s a basic human feature.

People accept things as presented in society, and don’t personally test and prove the factuality before accepting it as such. Back in the day you could test certain truths directly: plant a seed a certain way and see food grow. Learn to ride a horse and confirm it’s a relatively safe mode of travel. See, learn, copy, know, use. Satisfyingly linear and empowering.

Now? I trust that prepackaged food won’t poison me, that a car with ten thousand parts won’t spontaneously disassemble at highway speed, that a pill contains what the label promises. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the vehicle fails. Sometimes the pill harms. We perform daily risk–benefit calculations using a cocktail of trust, probability, hearsay, and hope. Truth is often outsourced.

Charisma helps too. So do credentials, institutional logos, and a confident tone. An idea delivered from a sufficiently convincing fellow walks straight into our “chamber of truth.” No Xray scanner, and with shoes on.

This human tendency may be universally developmental. As helpless children, we must trust the towering beings who feed and protect us. We don’t fact-check survival. We absorb what our providers present because our lives depend on them. Life is the ultimate truth; whatever comes bundled with it acquires authority. Eventually, what we’re fed becomes our body, our mind, and metabolizes into The Truth. Inexplicable things are labeled divine, dressing up the lack of explanation as a shrug in a tuxedo. Even pain from those providers can be reframed as love or necessity. Humans are remarkably adaptable that way. It keeps us alive. Not necessarily accurate, though.

Along came COVID one day, showing me just how prevalent this behavior was, including, and perhaps especially, amongst enlightened, cultured, modern folks.

Setting the tragedy aside, the societal reactions fascinated me.

Millions were sick. Thousands died. Everyone spoke of the virus as if they knew it. Yet, no one I knew owned a lab microscope. Information hop scotched from experts to agencies to media to neighbors to group chats. A few scientists were studying it, fewer knew its origin, none knew how to stop it.

“Knowledge,” but really mostly theories, evolved in real time.

Masks? Quarantine? Ventilators? Lie on your back or your stomach? Hospital or home? Advice shifted. Some measures proved harmful; others held up.

Findings were frequently treated as gospel.

Then came the vaccines—developed and released without the necessary and usual testing. Received as Tablets from Mount Science. Many quickly declared, “You must,” as though Science had spoken in a single, booming voice.

Dissenters were labeled selfish, stupid, dangerous… Most people invoking Science had never studied it, parsed raw data, or test-tubed anything more complex than salad dressing.

Real science is humble, advancing through rigorous testing, revision, and the perpetual possibility of being wrong, with no emotional loyalty. But when crossed with funding, prestige, politics, and fear, you get tainted results. With COVID, little was clear or proven. Even years later, debates about efficacy, side effects, and policy continue.

The public, however, is not so humble, prefers certainty, and will steamroll anything in its path to grab what they think resembles it. I watched people wield “science” the way believers wield scripture. An invisible authority validated by institutional lineage. Ideas hardened into identity markers, colored by emotional investment.

I did not hear, “We really don’t know yet. Here are competing hypotheses. What do you think?” It was, “This is the truth. Open your mouth and swallow.”

Disagreement invited social exile or creative coercion—financial, professional, relational. Excommunication, without incense.

Enforcers weren’t laboratory scientists - who were still wrestling data, many themselves slanted by their employer. Vigilante citizens were defending what they believed to be Truth, resembling religious fervor. Moral urgency, righteous anger, and the self-assuaging belief that non-believers are defective.

In the 1980’s, I had passionately proselytized my inherited religious truths on to my hapless brethren. In 2020, watching “smarter” people viciously shoot weaker truths at their own loved ones, was surprisingly clarifying. The sharp edges of my journey became blunted when seeing mainstream enlightened folks act so religiously.

The instinct to latch onto an unquestionable authority and protect it with indignation, appears to be human, not religious.

This realization made me cautious. If both religion and science can be used as armor against uncertainty, then certainty deserves scrutiny. We don’t handle “we don’t know” gracefully. We’d rather a warm, smelly diaper than learn to use the toilet.

My takeaway is not that nothing is true or that expertise is meaningless. It is that humility is underrated. Much of what we accept rests on trust in networks we cannot personally audit. The more complex the system, the more mediated our knowledge becomes.

So, I choose, as best I can, to avoid crowning my choice The Truth. It’s simply my current conclusion, based on limited information and my particular tolerance for risk. You may reach another. Ideally, we grant each other the dignity of that process.

As sexy as certainty is, I'd rather have resilience, flexibility, collaboration, and humor. I'm certain of that.